There are terrible things happening in the world. Don’t take them on. Observe & make choices.

Choose NOT to get egoically-engaged in these things.

That means don’t spike your anxiety or your rage if there is nothing immediate & direct that you can do about it. Doing so just engages your fight/flight “reptilian brain,” which is made for dealing with immediate, concrete threats, not things happening on TV.

When we do spike our anxiety or rage, we energize our bodies to meet the threat — but if the “threat” is on TV, there is no “resolution.” We can neither fight nor flee, so there is no nervous-system discharge and the stress on our bodymind just accumulates. AND, the media (and perhaps our social circle) keeps us activated.

When this happens, the story on TV gets enmeshed with our personal, stored “stories” and trauma and we can become increasingly entrapped in powerlessness.

The other thing is that the dross from this process goes into the “collective” mind-world and becomes a signal boost to everyone else’s distress & trauma — which then also amplifies our own, according to our susceptibility. Some of us have constellated a chunk of personal identity around “how terrible things are,” and it erodes our effectiveness as change agents and it makes us age prematurely.

Pop-spirituality “detachment” is really just numbing-out. Authentic detachment is not numbing or escaping, it’s entering a zone of clarity and inner silence — and feeling the right time and the right action, so that your action is precise and effective, and then you walk away from your action knowing that you have done what’s appropriate, needed, and your best-for-now.

The value of “detachment” is NOT so that you don’t feel. Feel it all, act decisively where possible, but don’t stew in it. The value of detachment is that you don’t add to the existing trauma/distress in yourself and the other sensitive people in your orbit — and your orbit is much larger than you may realize.